As I promised, I’ll now reveal my favorite gambling movie. There are a few “classics” that I haven’t seen, but I doubt that they can supplant my favorite.
In the opening scene of Rounders, when Matt Damon grabs his stashed wads of cash and then sneaks out without disturbing his sleeping girlfriend, my BP and I were literally high-fiving each other in the theater. And that was before the many times in my career when I did precisely that—slip out to hit a graveyard target while my girlfriend slept. It wasn’t the only time in the movie that my teammate and I were smiling ear-to-ear as the movie lived up to the high expectations created when we heard that Damon and Norton (and Malkovich, Turturro, and Janssen) were doing a poker movie.
Obviously no movie can faithfully depict the industry to a civilian audience, but Rounders does a great job. The voiceovers and game action explain the game sufficiently to an uninformed audience, without getting into too much detailed drudgery, and without butchering the game, as they do in the poker scene in Daniel Craig’s Casino Royale (anyone who plays poker finds it extremely irritating when the dealer replaces the cards on the board with James Bond’s cards in order to display the hand). Is the Oreo tell over the top? Maybe, but what do you want the screenwriter to do, expect the audience to notice that John Malkovich blinked three more times than usual while pondering his bet? Keep in mind that this movie came before the big poker boom. In 1998, the public was not as knowledgeable about poker and casinos, so depicting gambling in an entertaining but accurate way was a challenge.
More than the details of the game, I found the portrayal of the lifestyle to be vastly more accurate than any gambling movie, and several relevant themes were addressed: the stress on the relationship with the not-so-understanding girlfriend, the disruption in Matt Damon’s academic work, the shady characters and underground casinos, the methodical exploitation of targets on their route, the encounter with violent cops, the strip club, the different playing styles of grinders vs. blasters, the side job (driving the truck), the borrowing (“the juice is still running”!).
You can always tell a great movie by how many of its quotes seep into mainstream pop culture, or in this case AP gambling subculture. There are so many lines from Rounders that we quote or paraphrase: “Does he look like a man beaten by Jacks?!”, “The move was folding,” “We needed that pot!”, “… where the sand turns to gold …”, “Don’t splash the pot”, “Well, we all know each other here, so …” (which is one of the best scenes in the film), “He beat me—straight up—pay dat mee-an his money” (and every other line spoken by John Malkovich).
What’s interesting is that I have found that Rounders is an excellent barometer. In my soliciting opinions on gambling movies (both online and in person, with both pros and civilians), I have found that most professional gamblers liked or loved Rounders, but that the response among non-professionals and low-level counters is not as great. So if you didn’t like Rounders, it probably says more about you than it does about the movie. Also, the parts of Rounders (and “21”) that non-professionals find unrealistic are the same parts that pros often consider the MOST realistic. For example, the idea of having a stripper cash chips for the team is something that is not at all unrealistic. Sometimes a team has to move a lot of chips, and needs someone with a clean, local ID to do it. But I digress.
The scene where the annoying dealer wants to robotically enforce rules instead of look at the bigger picture resonates with every pro. One night in the Palms poker room, the only game broke when the floorman would not allow the fish to re-buy below the minimum buy-in, even though every single player at the table enthusiastically wanted to allow it.
Part of the reason pros seem to like Rounders more than non-pros do might be because Rounders revolves around poker, and most high-level pros have some experience (often massive experience) with poker, whereas most card-counters are extremely narrow in their experience. I have witnessed numerous counters who do not even know how to play carnival games, baccarat, poker, and craps. To me that lack of education is as inexcusable as a gambler not knowing basic strategy. Knowing how to play most or all of the games should be considered “casino basic strategy” for any working pro.
In the interest of disclosure, let me state that I have an affinity for Ivy League movie stars, and the sultry Famke Janssen bears a resemblance to a well-known pro, but you don’t see me endorsing “The Saint” here. If anyone wants to attend a showing of Rounders before next year’s Blackjack Ball, so that I can have an opportunity to elaborate on my endorsement of the movie, let me know.
I hated Rounders. Absolutely despised it. I found it painful to watch every one of the seven times I watched it, and I’ll hate it at every opportunity I get to watch it in the future. When’s it on next?
Rounders is what got me into poker. I was a professional online poker player for years. Easily my favorite gambling movie as well. Count me in for the screening.
Favorite line from the movie:
In the poker game of life, women are the rake.
Yep, great line! I’m in the middle on Rounders — lots of good, but typically oversensationalized — e.g., the referenced Oreo tell. Having watched a lot of gambling movies with a critical eye, it seems near impossible for the moviemakers to refrain, but I also have to assume that they know what they’re doing to attract the biggest audience and getting the point across with an overt Oreo-type tell is probably the way to go. No question there’s more good than bad in Rounders, but I also thought that the poker lifestyle was well depicted way back (1965) in The Cincinnati Kid.
They didn’t trust the audience to interpret subtleties. They didn’t trust the audience to realize the stresses and nuances of the gambler’s life. In real life, a “tell” can be as subtle as a cocking of the head, a twitch, or just an altered sequence of motions. Gamblers aren’t worried about getting beaten up by the police–they’re worried about getting their bankrolls beaten up. But that wouldn’t make for Hollywoodesque drama. There is actually quite a bit of tension, conflict, and even pathos in a professional gambler’s life. But portray all that accurately rather than sensationally? That is utterly beyond Hollywood’s power. They can made “Godzilla” remakes until they turn blue in the face, but Hollywood will NEVER make a decent, let alone an accurate, poker-themed movie.
(BTW, I did like the scene where John Turturro’s (?) character chews out Matt Damon for disdaining his life as a grinder. 999,998 out of a million wannabes who hit Vegas with “three stacks of high society” wind up crawling home broke. A winning poker player has to be prepared to fold every hand for two hours if need be, not fantasize about a dick-waving contest with Johnny Chan.)
Matt Damon’s character’s relationship with “Worm” is grossly unrealistic. No professional gambler could have a leak like that and survive. You talk about realistic depiction of the AP lifestyle–well, Matt Damon’s savvy poker player would have ditched Worm ASAP. The cops-playing-poker scene is grossly unrealistic. A group of cops would not commit multiple felonies based on flimsy evidence of cheating in an illegal poker game–they would all be risking their careers. Toss them out of the game, sure. But beat up and rob them? No way. Two of the hands with KGB are grossly unrealistic–one where Damon folds Aces-up, and another where he calls a preflop raise with nothing and then lucks into a straight. Any decent player would have called the first hand and never played the second. The only poker scene that is even the slightest bit realistic is where the pros circle the two drunken businessmen like sharks and rip them to pieces. But even there, so many pros would NEVER be together at the same table; they would spread out. Honor among thieves, and all that.
The movie is crap. Fun to watch at times, but nauseatingly inaccurate and unrealistic.
I don’t mean to come off as an asshole, but every single thing you said is wrong. So much so that if you completely inverted your meaning behind every statement, you would have a rant that was mostly true.
Well that’s not all true I guess, you’re right about the bumhunting table selection thing, but I have no idea what you mean when you say “honor among thieves, and all that.”
Anyway, you’re absolutely wrong . Normally I would let this sort of thing go, but you present yourself as someone who knows what they’re talking about when you absolutely don’t at all. That is one of my buttons, and you managed to push it.
Well, I’d have bankrupted that Oreo-cracking player a long time before hotshot kid arrived.
At least, you’d expect someone to have done so with such an obvious tell.
Bad movie… I even prefer Runner, Runner (even though I haven’t finished watching it) 😛
Let It Ride – smoking hot Tilly, genius Dreyfeuss,
Owning Mahowny – betting racks of purple at baccarat, greatest gambling scene ever
Casino – uuh, five minute dissection of hole carding, the Deniro precision.
21 – major dissapointment
Lucky You – some decent discussions of the game. How a good poker player doesn’t have a shred of bankroll management is totally unrealistic. Greatest introduction to the side scene of prop betting
Casino Royale – boat,quads, straight flush in Hold Em. Great scene, but that don’t even happen in Omaha that often. Bond gambling scenes are classy though. And I might be naive in assuming most “good AP’s” haven’t had a lot of big games in high limit rooms. Being comfortable and being a winner in that setting is what Bond is a master at
The Sting – not necessarily a gambling movie, but the con man lifestyle intertwined with it, and Johnny Hooker blowing his half of the first score on a fixed underground roulette game, or the infamous poker game on the train scene where Paul Newman out cheats Doyle Lonnigan is great.
Runner,Runner – legit gambling discussions and more refreshing storyline, even though the movie just did not click at all
High Roller – Michael Imperioli is just a boss. I wish the Stuey vs. Bob Stupak 6 deck BJ 100k bet would have been a scene in the movie, but they did the back room Gin scene with Pat Morita scene to showcase St Ungar’s card playing genius. This movie connects super hard, the drugs, the fucking off of money, the glory of being the best, having an edge, balancing life with such a stressful profession.
I’ve read about the Stu Ungar vs. Bob Stupak $100K 6D BJ bet but Mike Sexton who was apparently there tells another story. I’m not going to doubt that Stu may have been able to do such a feat but Mike tells a different story which is still impressive to me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=JGbm9GMkWvs
Whenever your ready to lose $10K I’ll take that bet.